Ebook Cracking the Coding Interview 189 Programming Questions and Solutions Gayle Laakmann McDowell 1235264539136 Books

Product details Paperback 706 pages Publisher CareerCup; 6th edition (July 1, 2015) Language English ISBN-10 0984782869 ISBN-13 978-0984782857 ASIN 0984782850

Cracking the Coding Interview 189 Programming Questions and Solutions Gayle Laakmann McDowell 1235264539136 Books Reviews

• This book summarizes in concrete form how the "white tower" side of these companies use these kinds of subjective and unrealistic "entrance exams" to exclude perfectly capable people from their exclusive "club".
  
  They refuse to standardize on a fair, independent, and common testing system as any other education, or professional industry, already do.
  
  You can bet that any of their engineers that got in years ago would not readily still pass these tests, as it doesn't represent any normal, day-to-day activity that wouldn't take more time and research to solve.
  
  You could have 25 years of a successful career at another company with many delivered, production products under your belt, and then find you are nothing more than an idiot not worth hiring after these timed tests.
• As programming interview prep books go, this one is currently the most popular of the bunch. It's OK, in that you'll find material to practice for the whiteboard interviews that are prevalent at big tech companies. But let's be honest this whole ecosystem is toxic. Here's a lady who worked for a few years at Google (that's right -- she worked for a *few* years, and only interned at those other big names she mentioned), and has parlayed that rather limited work experience into an entire lifestyle business, where she coaches programmers on how to pass interviews. That should tell you something important the interview-prep industry has completely decoupled itself from the actual job of programming!
  
  I've been writing software for a long time, and I'm competent at my job. I've worked at some well-known companies, and I've interviewed a LOT of people. But I'm here to tell you that even I can't pass one of these interviews without studying. That's a bad thing. If the goal of an interview is to identify competent programmers, we've gone far, far off the rails with these kinds of interviews.
  
  But of course, that isn't (entirely) the author's fault. She's just a cog in the machine, and profits by perpetuating it. Because the presence of books like these create a vicious cycle prep book gets written; interviewees study/memorize answers; interviewers make questions "harder" to compensate; new book gets written! It never ends. The grinder continues to turn, and whereas ten years ago you could get a good job with some string or linked-list manipulation questions, now you've got people who consider whiteboard coding of topcoder elite questions to be the baseline measurement of programmer competency. That's nuts.
  
  You'll even run into lazy interviewers who take questions directly from this book, which is the ultimate in stupidity if "good" candidates have prepared from the book, and you ask questions directly from the book, what are you really accomplishing, other than a test of memorization skills? And yet, this is distressingly common. I've seen it myself. I've had recruiters from major tech companies send me pages from this book so that I can "prepare" for their interviews. What now?
  
  This kind of crap only stops if the more senior amongst us simply *refuse* to do it anymore. New grads have no leverage, so it's up to the rest of us to stand up and demand change. If you work at a company, please, INSIST that your interview process avoid questions from this book. If you interview programmers, please, stick to questions that demonstrate actual day-to-day work competency. And yes, if you're interviewing and you have the leverage, stand up to companies that try to abuse you with this kind of demeaning nonsense.
  
  If we are to be professionals, we have to demand the career respect afforded to professionals. That includes not being treated like children when we are interviewed.
• I’m sure this is a good book. However, you would think a book on software would have what language it is focused on readily available. It does not. I had to do research to figure it out... after purchasing it. Very annoying. For your info, its in java. If you’re not a java developer it’s useless til you decide you want to learn java. And by that time you’re probably working and don’t need an interview prep book. PUT THE LANGUAGE ON THE FRONT PAGE
• This got me through four interviews, and I got an offer from each one. I would recommend this to anyone, with two big provisos (1) if you’re going for a domain specific position like compilers, make sure to read up on those separately; and (2) focus on the Moderate problems. The Hard problems frankly weren’t asked and it was much more important to have the whiteboard coding method down.
• Proven - no one cares how good you are when interviewing with Major Tech Companies. Your real skills for future work and interview process have close to nothing in common. Everyone in Main Tech looks at how good have you studied this book. I find it awful, but if you want to land such a job - this book is a must. Book itself is good though if you just want to cover/refresh a list of IT topics.
• I graduated with a CS degree in 2014 and recently decided to find a new job. The first 200 or so pages are a great review for someone who wants to brush up on all of the "must-know" topics such as data structures, search algorithms, algorithmic complexity, sorting, etc. There are a handful of questions specific to each of these chapters.
  
  After the chapters comes a slough of example interview questions rated as easy/medium/hard, each with hints that interviewers might provide if you were to get stuck as well as a solution.
  
  Interviewing with companies can be a pretty grueling process so if you want a much better chance of landing the job the first time, I would highly recommend this book.
• This is obviously the must-have book to prepare for your SWE/SDE interview. I have some small quibbles with how some of the problems were worded, but the level of difficulty is very representative of what the big tech companies are using. You might even run into these questions in your own interviews since Gayle is choosing questions that are popular among interviewers today. If you have time, you should of course pick up an algorithms textbook also. I recommend Skiena's The Algorithm Design Manual and Sedgewick's Algorithms (4th Edition) textbooks. The classic Cormen is too verbose and proof-heavy for the purposes of preparing for an interview.
  
  The DP solutions in this book are not actually tabular DP formulations--I recommend looking at the problems here http//people.cs.clemson.edu/~bcdean/dp_practice/ (Brian Dean's Dynamic Programming Practice Problems). Gayle presents memoized solutions, which are much easier conceptually but not as clean or performant as bottoms-up tabular solutions.